Post penguin & panda update. what would be a good seo strategies for brand new sites

[btrinh]

Hi there. I have the luxury of launching a few sites after the penguin and panda updates, so I can start from scratch and hopefully do it right. I will get SEO companies to help me with this so i just want to ask for advices on what would be a good strategies for a brand new site. my understand of the new updates is this

• content and user experience is important, like how long they spend, how many pages etc

• social media is important. we intent to engage FB and twitter alot. in New Zealand, not too many people use google+ so we will probbaly just concentrate on the first two

• hopefully we will try to get people to share our website via social media, apparent that is important

• should only concentrate on high quality backlinks with a good diverse set of alt tags, but concentrate on branding rather than keywords.

Am i correct to say that so far? if that is the principle, what would be the strategy to implement these goals? Links to any articles would also be great please. Love learning.

i just want to do this right and hopefully try to future proof the sites against updates as possible. i guess quality content and links will most likely to be safe. Thank you for your help.

[btrinh]

thank you for the great advices Kurt. have a lot of think about how to best move forward and get people involved, and more importantly, how to capture all that seo juice so i wont loose any.

seo seems alot more fun now then before when it was just about linking

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Hi Btrinh,

Social engagement is about connecting with people.  It’s about responding to people’s comments, asking questions, etc.  The point is to create a relationship with people or create a community of people.  It’s not something that has a direct connection with SEO, but rather an indirect connection.  By forming these relationships/communities, it makes it so people are more likely to consume your content and then link, Like, Share, retweet, +1 etc. when you push content out (the content still needs to be good).  They are also more likely to tell others about your organization.  So, it provides indirect SEO benefit as well as many other non-SEO benefits.

Good on-page optimization is a must, but link building is different today.  For link building, I think the focus today needs to be on doing a great job with your company/website, creating a good user experience on your website, creating great content, connecting with people personally and on social sites so you can push your content out and get people to respond by linking, Liking, retweeting, etc.

Most of the old link building strategies which focused specifically on getting a link, especially one with your target anchor text, aren’t of much benefit anymore.  Some can provides some value if done while also doing natural link building.  You might get some benefit from article marketing if you produce good enough content that people use your stuff.  You don’t get any value from links on the article sites themselves.  There is also value to contacting relevant websites and asking for a link, but that is best done by first forming a relationship with someone who works on the website and you are giving them a good reason to want to link to you (your company is good, you have good content, etc.).

The point is that Google has always wanted links to come naturally, either because someone likes your company/website or you produce great content.  Up until recently, they weren’t technically able to enforce that, so people were able to come up with unnatural link building strategies that worked.  Now, they’ve advanced their tech to where those unnatural strategies generally don’t work anymore.

-Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

[btrinh]

thank you so much Kurt. Its great to know that everything you said agrees with everything i have read, and i appreciate the finer details that you have raised. however a few quick questions if i may please

1- engaging people. how would i do this to capture the social signals. what i mean is this. i can get people to talk on my FB page, thats not a problem. but i assume my website wont see any of this. So does this mean i have to somehow import this into my site? Like i need to allow people to comment inside the website via their FB account?

2- yes two of the sites that we are building will have lots of videos as well, so im glad you raise the importance of videos.

3- natural link building. from the way you describe, does this mean i dont need to hire seo companies to do linking work anymore, and only ask for their help with onpage SEO? since alot of them do talk about offering natural link building, submit articles to forums etc.

thank you Kurt

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Hi Btrinh,

It sounds like your moving in the right direction and Pedram had some great advice.  To answer your more specific questions...

1. Effectively incorporating social media into your SEO can involve a lot of things, but I'd suggest you primarily focus on two things, sharing content (and having your content shared) and engaging people.  Sharing content yourself is easy enough, but getting other people to share it is trickier.  People need a reason to share something and the best reason is if it impacts them and they feel compelled to share.  Things that impact people are things that are funny, moving, very interesting, about a cause they like, and even sometimes if something is a great deal.  Beyond sharing content you want to engage people.  Ask for opinions. Ask questions. When people post on your account, respond.  Share other people's stuff, etc.
2. Natural links means people link to your site of their own desire without reward.  This usually means that either your company does a good enough job that people recommend/talk about you or that you produce content that is valuable enough to link to.  By the way, you referred to "alt tags", but I think you mean anchor text.  Alt tags are generally used with images.  Assuming you mean anchor text (the text of the link), you want a combination of branding, naked URLs, keywords (and variations), and random words (click here, etc.).  The thing is, that if you are getting most of your links by producing great content and doing a good job with your company/website, then this will happen naturally.
3. Keyword research is essential.  You need to know what keywords to target in your content and, to some extent, your link building.  On-page SEO is still very important, so using keywords in your content is important.  As for link building, I prefer a natural approach (as described above), but even with a natural approach you can target keywords by including them in content titles and things like that.  It's natural for someone to link to an article using it's title as the anchor text.  So, using a keyword in the title, can get you keyword-rich links naturally.
4. I like video content as well.  Done right, it can be very cost effective.  Video has two other great benefits.  If you are using people, you can create a stronger connection with people than they get from reading an article.  Secondly, Google uses a different algorithm for the videos used in their blended results.  So, if your site doesn't have enough authority to rank well with a page, it may still be able to rank well with a video.
5. I use Google Analytics.  It isn't perfect, but it's good.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

[btrinh]

Thanks pedram. ok i think in principle i might be right, but in details, i have no idea what it means. so i guess some specific questions might be

• how to effectively incorporate social media into SEO? are we specifically talking about people sharing pages from the website onto social media? Is a FB like or a comment enough, or do we need to encourage sharing more?
• natural links, yes - but what does that mean. it is diverse alt tags, make sure each link is surrounded by organic text, diversify sources of backlinks?
• if keyword is less important, is it still important to do keyword research and integrate into content?
• what about video content?
• you talked about analytic pacakage, is google analytics not powerful enough?

[CSawatzky]

You're certainly on the right track. Starting from scratch is always a fun thing (if you're an SEO nerd like I am). You can set rules and goals in place from the get go and make sure best practices are followed as fresh content is always delivered and updated.

Content and user experience certainly are a big big plus. Make sure to do some good keyword research and tastefully integrate them within your content. Install a good analytics package and monitor user engagement. Social media definitely is another great outlet - make sure to use it effectively, especially Google+. I've seen some pages rank higher just by sharing on G+ (of course there are a lot of other factors, but this is just a correlation, not causation). Even if a lot of people don't use it, it's important to have a presence.

Dont' build crappy links. As you said, stick with quality over quantity - always. The more natural your content and the more quality it is, the more it will get shared and the more it will get linked to.

In short, you're on the right track